“Those memory sticks you had analysed, the circumstantial evidence you’ve gathered surrounding them, the Mossad guy, the woman from Six,” said the American. “It’s a Black Flag, you know it and I know it. We’ve been goaded into following a trail to Tehran. The Israelis have gone too far this time but it changes nothing. If those hostages die we’re going to war.”

Black Flag: a masterclass on the interplay of domestic and international relations. Turf wars between faceless Home Office bureaucrats, Cro-Magnon Met coppers and unaccountable spooks at MI5 and MI6; fought alongside the interests of America and Israel. Aren’t they all on the same side? Perhaps those who we pay to govern the nation on our behalf should avoid the undignified scramble to sport the earliest poppy pre-November, a charade comparable to “Christmas”…

Filed under: Culture, Society Tagged: Black Dog, IAmACunt, Poetry]]>https://londonlowlife.wordpress.com/2017/06/27/those-thoughts/feed/0slater0211Justice for Daniel Morgan 30 Years Onhttps://londonlowlife.wordpress.com/2017/03/09/__trashed-2/
https://londonlowlife.wordpress.com/2017/03/09/__trashed-2/#commentsThu, 09 Mar 2017 17:38:22 +0000http://londonlowlife.wordpress.com/?p=6541Continue reading →]]>Jonathan Rees was drinking with his business partner, 37-year-old private investigator Daniel Morgan, at the Golden Lion pub in Sydenham, south-east London, on 10 March 1987. Morgan left the pub at 9pm, fifteen minutes after Rees departed. As Morgan unlocked his BMW he was hit in the back of the head with an axe. The fourth and final blow was so ferocious that the blade fused with Morgan’s cheekbone.

Why was Daniel Morgan killed? Threats of violence are an occupational hazard in the seedy and squalid world of private detection. David Bray, a bailiff at Morgan and Rees’s firm Southern Investigations, claimed that Morgan had been having an affair with a local lady and that “the husband had found out about them and had phoned Danny at home and threatened to kill him.”

A few weeks prior to his murder, a West London repossession led to Morgan receiving a phone call: “Living on borrowed time. You’re a dead man.”

Five police investigations at a cost of £50 million have been conducted into the murder of Daniel Morgan. The stench of Met corruption remains strong. At the crime scene, the police failed to stop people from leaving the Golden Lion or to collect glasses and ashtrays for prints.

As the last known person to see Morgan alive, it was important for Rees (a freemason like more than a few policemen) to be questioned thoroughly. Rees was interviewed by his drinking buddy and confidante Detective Sergeant Sid Fillery, who moonlighted for Southern Investigations. Neither were Rees’s car nor clothes examined forensically. After Fillery visited the company offices, Morgan’s desk diary for 1987 disappeared.

According to senior investigating officer Douglas Campbell, Fillery had “ripped the guts out of the case”. Three weeks later, Rees, his two crooked brothers-in-law, Fillery and two cops from Catford nick – within whose bounds Morgan was killed – were arrested for murder. The matter was then dropped.

Ex-DS Sid Fillery then went on to work at Southern Investigations. As journalists Michael Gillard and Laurie Flynn conclude:

In essence, Rees’s best friend who ended up playing an instrumental role in the bungled murder inquiry had effortlessly left the Yard on a full medical pension, only to resurface in Daniel’s private investigation agency filling the dead man’s shoes and working in partnership with the main murder suspect.

Southern Investigations under the name Law and Commercial went on to earn hundreds of thousands of pounds a year from newspapers – £116,000 a year from the News of the World alone in 1996/97. In the words of Peter Jukes Southern Investigations was a “one-shop stop for illicit information because of their ability to blag, bug, burgle and bribe cops.”

In concert with senior News International employee Alex Marunchak, the firm acted to destabilize the fourth investigation into the murder of Daniel Morgan by placing Detective Chief Superintendent Dave Cook under surveillance.

Earlier this year, Dave Cook himself was found to have perverted the course of justice in his pursuit of Rees and co, though Mr Justice Mitting ruled that Cook “genuinely” believed men to be guilty.

Holmes was master of the Manor of Bensham Masonic Lodge, Croydon. Four months after Morgan’s death, Holmes killed himself. According to a journalist, Holmes was “so bent that his police colleagues openly joked that the undertaker wouldn’t be able to straighten him out long enough to nail down the coffin lid.” At his funeral, one wreath bore the tribute: “To our brave, wonderful and worshipful master who chose death rather than dishonour his friends and workmates.”

In 2013 the then Home Secretary Theresa May appointed the Daniel Morgan Independent Panel to:

shine a light on the circumstances of Daniel Morgan’s murder, its background and the handling of the case since 1987. In doing so the Panel is seeking to address questions arising, in particular those relating to:

police involvement in Daniel Morgan’s murder;

the role played by police corruption in protecting those responsible for the murder from being brought to justice and the failure to confront that corruption; and

the incidence of connections between private investigators, police officers and journalists at the News of the World and other parts of the media, and alleged corruption involved in the linkages between them.

Alastair Morgan has spent the past three decade fighting for justice for his brother Daniel. While supporting the Independent Panel, Alastair initially hoped for a judicial inquiry into Daniel’s murder. Alastair believes this request was refused because of the embarrassment around ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson’s employment as David Cameron’s director of communications.

Given that investigations into the murder of Daniel Morgan have been compromised from the start, what better way could the government hope to achieve some kind of justice for Daniel than by listening to Alastair and commencing with Leveson Two?

Fourteen people have been arrested so far including 43-year-old Sergeant Frank Partridge, known as the “Sheriff of Soho”, Constable Jim Sollars, a 55-year-old known as the “Gruffalo” on account of his 6ft 8″ frame, and Ryan Bishti, owner of the exclusive Cirque le Soir.

“Fun Time Frankie” was dismissed from the Met late last year on unrelated charges of fraudulently travelling first-class on trains.

Aside from claims that the officers received free hospitality at Soho’s nightspots, Partridge is said to be fond of strip clubs while Sollars loved listening to live jazz at Ronnie Scott’s, it is alleged that these officers were pressurizing venues into using security from firms TSS and Profile Protection.

Source: Tom Morris, 2014, WikiCommons

Terry Neil, the head of the now defunct TSS, was believed to control around 80% of the doors in Soho. A former enforcer for the notorious Adams family with a conviction for armed robbery, Neil was particularly found of fast cars and Premier Cru Chablis.

By late 2013 those involved were aware of these allegations. Partridge was planning to take a job with Profile Protection; over the next two years insiders at TSS confirm that they lost a number of contracts to Profile. Sollars was hoping to be employed as a consultant for a leading London licensing lawyer.

Four security companies have complained to the police and journalists that they faced unfair competition from both TSS and Profile. Allegations have also been made against licensing units in Camden and Croydon.

A former TSS employee claims that Neil had been entertaining police officers at strip clubs since 2007, prior to Partridge and Sollars working for the Westminster licensing unit. Under condition of anonymity this person told BuzzFeed: “I think it’s a lot larger than just the people who have been arrested and I think it goes back a lot longer. I’ve been told that it went … incredibly high.”

A senior official for Westminster council commented: “You do have to ask whether those who were responsible for line management and professional setting of standards were asleep at the wheel or ignoring it. If they didn’t hear about it one must question what they were doing in that role.”

‘You still in the racket?’ he asked.
‘You mean am I still in the same game?’
‘Sure. Use your loaf. What the hell else would I mean?’
‘Yes. There’s nothing else for it when you’ve once been inside.’

One screwsman to another. Fresh out of Wormwood Scrubs after a nine-months spell in stir for housebreaking, twenty-five-year-old William Kennedy, known as the Gilt Kid on account of his blond hair, is a young man determined not to go straight. The Gilt Kid. An exploration of a world of petty criminals, ponces, poufs, prostitutes and heavy-fisted policemen in London’s West End; the cancer at the heart of Empire. A slice of hardboiled film noir.

Published in 1936, the Gilt Kid chimes with the end of an era. Victorian and Edwardian avatars, Rudyard Kipling and George V, show their colours, and die. Dead but not banished. Shadows of Dickens and Mayhew, Conan Doyle, Conrad and Robert Louis Stevenson stalk the scene. A life on the margins, a world of five-penny ales, lizzie (cheap Lisbon red wine), Gold Flake cigarettes, the public bar, seedy cafés and coffee stalls. More than 30,000 souls eking their living off the streets. A London living on borrowed time, the death knell signalled by the Blitz, her demise hastened by the affluent society.

For ‘London had become a city of flats’, so said Sir Austen Chamberlain, MP. Take Hammersmith, the borough of the Scrubs, where Kennedy commits his crime. A place with its own hidden histories: murder and suicide off the Hammersmith Bridge, shady clubs and Fascists meeting at the town hall. Hints of decay, middle-class flight to the suburbs. An area clinging desperately to its vanishing respectability. Early echoes of post-45 high-rise crime-blight:

The block of flats was built of red brick and the inner walls of the staircase were made of those white glazed tiles with which public lavatories and police-court cells are built. Their feet sounded hollowly on the stone steps. There was a nasty iron handrail. The flats were obviously for the lower middle class. It was unlikely that any of them contained anything worthy of a burglar’s time or attention. …

It’s funny, he was thinking. Every one of these gaffs holds a family. Each family is cut off from the others. Nobody has the foggiest what is going on anywhere else. They read the crime news in the papers and get a thrill out of seeing a film about crooks, yet if they were to know that a couple of burglars were walking up their main staircase they would fall down dead with fright.

Forget the making of modern London, the whiff of America – metroland, milk bars and the motor car; radio and refrigeration, Selfridges and Woolworths, the Savoy and the Ritz, the nightclub and the cinema. Curtis’s London is an experience in cold truth. Victorian ghosts, the marginal stage centre.

Copyright: Dreamstime

Suffused with an aura of decline, the Gilt Kid’s home life is centred around the shabby gentility of his cheap furnished lodgings in Pimlico – ‘the houses, for one thing, had been built for far wealthier people than were living in them’ – and the cheerful vulgarity of the environs of Victoria, a downmarket red-light district on the wane, a step down from the Lisle Street janes, patronized by soldiers stationed at the many local barracks and commuters. All that glitters is not gold:

The market stalls in Warwick Street, which at night added a vivid gaiety to the street scene, looked by day merely squalid. The ground around them was littered with bits of paper and cabbage leaves. Pale, harassed-looking women, for the most part with string-bags hanging from their arms, stared either at the stalls or into the windows of the cut-price shops; spinning their money out as best they could, they would be buying cheap tinned salmon, condensed milk, hard soaplike Canadian cheese, and salt-encrusted, badly cured Empire bacon. Those who scorned margarine would purchase imitation imported butter at tenpence a pound. On Saturdays they could get cheap scraps of dusty meat from the stalls. Few, if any, ate real food.

Hardly the glam of the smash-and-grab kings Ruby Sparks and Billy Hill. Hill has much to answer for. An imaginative man. Watch out for Duncan Webb too. You can’t trust a journalist. Or a policeman.

Curtis is a guide to the lowlife, his characters companions to Patrick Hamilton’s whores, Gerald Kersh’s pathetic ponce Fabian and Robert Westerby’s small-time race gangs; all authors with more than a degree of experience of the worlds which they narrate. Neither a Home Counties whodunit, nor an underworld of misremembered celebrity gangsters before their time.

Darby Sabini, ‘Britain’s Godfather’ according to an ex-Daily Express hack, who had long-left London by the thirties, was immortalized by Graham Greene as Colleoni in Brighton Rock. Hoxton thug Jimmy Spinks, who may or may not have thrown the chip shop owner’s cat into the deep-fat fryer when asked to pay for his supper, as Richard Attenborough’s Pinky. A seventeen-year-old kid. Juvenile delinquent in-extremis. Spinky the great-uncle of bare-knuckle fighter Lenny McClean, of Lock and Stock cameo fame. See Curtis’s complaint to Curtis Clark, a producer at Raintree who had an option on the Gilt Kid:

An elementary error in dramatic construction is the way those Mafia characters are dragged in at the heel of the hunt. […] The so-called Sabini mob from Clerkenwell in the 30s were Anti-Fascist and, though of Italian parentage, were thoroughly Cockney in speech and behaviour. They operated mainly around the Races and Dog tracks.

Take Isabella’s, a café, a ‘ribby kind of a gaff’ in Lisle Street – the haunt of ‘drabs’ the lowest of Soho’s generally poor prostitutes – on the fringes of the Italian quarter centred on and around Newport Dwellings, Newport Buildings, Gerrard, Frith and Old Compton Streets:

Gerratd St, now part of Soho’s Chinatown – Dreamstime

At the top end an Irish girl was sitting with two men, both of whom wore striped suits with wide, padded shoulders. One of them had a north-country accent. All three of them were talking in low vehement tones. They were, apparently, having a row about something of another. Money or women. Very likely the two.

The Gilt Kid ran a disapproving eye over them. He did not like these Grecian cows. They swore like navvies, drank like fishes, and fought like hell among themselves. They always picked up with ponces, usually Yids, and then turned them down for another bloke. That was probably what the barney was about now. Both the men looked as if they might be on the Jo Roncing stakes. Irish janes were good to fellows on the bum and to the boys on the gagging lark, he’d heard somewhere.

An antidote to the alzheimic golden memories of Frankie Fraser, Freddie Foreman and the Krays, myths retold by ex-journalists, Edward Hart and Duncan Webb, the staple of ‘true-crime’ historians, Brian McDonald, James Morton, Robert Murphy and Donald Thomas.

London, the city of the dispossessed, more Stephen Graham’s London Nights than John Bull or the News of the World. More downtrodden than deviant. The illusion of freedom shrouds this city of dreadful delight:

The pavements were crowded, girls hung on men’s arms, laughed up in their faces. A sound of laughter, a buzz of conversation, a busy rattle of glasses issued out from all the public houses. He was companionless. He could, naturally, if he wanted to do so, go into a bar and help to increase its hum; he could, if he wanted to do so, pick up a girl, even a straight-cut, and have her walk arm-in-arm with him. What was the use? He would have only purchased companionship in the bar by virtue of the money in his pocket, he would only have a girl hanging on his arm because he was a man and she craved male society in order to show off in front of her friends. In cold truth, nobody in the world cared a damn about him. He was as lonely here, at liberty in the streets of London, as ever he had been, sitting on the floor of his locked cell in prison sewing mailbags. It was a hell of a life.

Soho – Dreamstime

A man marked, the Gilt Kid avoids underground stations, he’s a ‘suspicious person’. No chances, no choices, the future written on him. At mercy to the streets: ‘He spread, with a characteristic gesture, his long thief’s fingers fanwise on the bar in front of him and then, noticing their ingrained grime and the black rims of his nails, hastily hid them from sight.’ A man determined. Just as Marx said.

The Gilt Kid ‘wanted to be a good communist but it seemed to him that all this theorizing was rot.’ He despairs with the Left, moaning to a vendor of the Daily Worker:

‘Listen, you hold demonstrations,’ he began, ‘meetings, hunger-marches and all that bull. What the hell good does it do? Just a few mugs get nicked and a few more have sore heads where the slops have bashed them with their batons. You can’t tell me that brings the revolution any nearer.’

… ‘Start a riot. Lead a row in Bond Street and loot all the shops. Collect all the bums in London and take them into one of the flash hotels and let them demand to be fed. You hear about hunger-marchers making rows and demanding grub. Where’d they go? To the Ritz, to Lyons’ Corner House, even? No! The workhouse. That’s just about your mark, kicking up a shine at the spike.

Life went on to imitate art when in November 1938, 200 men descended on the Ritz Grill and ‘demanded tea for tuppence.’ May Day. Call the police.

‘Bastards. All bogies were bastards’, a not unpopular view in more than a few of London’s working-class districts. Police as Law, the ever-present threat of the truncheon. Memories die hard. Violence echoing from the hunger marches through to Cable Street, and beyond. The Gilt Kid ‘could remember back in stir that when people said that Justice was blind, they really meant that it shut one eye.’

There’s only one way to be heard. ‘He’d lost seven days’ remission in prison for hitting a cleaner whom he thought to be carving him up over his rations.’ Teased by a lousy Victoria Station tart for not being able to get it up, the Gilt Kid threatens her with ‘a kick in the minge if you don’t shut up.’ Brute force as Law:

The policeman caught the connecting link of the Gilt Kid’s handcuffs and yanked him to his feet. He dodged, bounded forward between the uniformed men at the detective and, raising his hands above his head, dashed the heavy steel into the startled officer’s face. Before he fell to a sledgehammer blow behind on the back of his neck he had the joy of seeing blood spurt all over his victim’s face.

Crook and copper, both products of the same streets. All know their place, suffocated by the stench of class:
A street-hawker came into the bar. He kept his goods – razor blades, cards of studs, boot-laces, safety pins and ties – in a cheap suitcase made of paper grained to look like leather. The management here, as in most other public houses, would allow him only into the public bar. Public bar customers were only working men and having, for the most part, less money than the harlots and petit bourgeois in the saloon, were entitled to be worried by the importunities of hawkers and street musicians.

Most of them stared the hawker blankly in the face when he held his open suitcase in front of them; some turned their heads away as if they did not care to look upon the unholy sight of a poor man earning his bed for the night …Poor bastards, none of them was far above the poverty line himself. Some of them, maybe, would have to go hungry as a result of having drunk a couple of pints of fivepenny ale.

The language of class imprisons all. Waiting to come up before the beak at the police court, the Gilt Kid:

looked disgustingly at his fellow prisoners. There were four of them, all bums. They were just the sort of people who gave the boys a bad name and started people chucking off hot air about the ‘lower criminal classes’. One was up for begging, one for obstruction with a coster’s barrow, the third for hawking without a license, and the fourth for bashing his old lady. Not one of them a decent screwsman could chat with.
Those at the bottom of the pile haunt the Gilt Kid. A down-and-out world of screevers (pavement artists), gaggers (generic street performers), nobbers (collecting coins for beggars), chanters (street singers), clodhoppers (street dancers), mugfakers (street photographers), didecais (gypsys) and tobys (tramps). For the tramp is his shadow, and his fate. The Gilt Kid has seen:

The worst of rooms was better than the best of kips. And the worst of kips was better than being properly on the ribs. Christ, yes, he thought, I’d rather be back in stir again than have another night on the deck. One of those had been quite enough.

Creeping around the place all night, sitting on the seats in Trafalgar Square and along the Mall until it had been too cold to stay seated any longer; and then walking about to get warm until his feet, blistered from broken boots and sweat-rotten socks, had grown too sore to let him walk any more; sitting down again until it was too cold, and so on until five o’clock when the café opened in St Martin’s Lane – that café where they charge three-ha’pence for a cup of tea and let a man sit for two hours or more over it.

Of course, some bums touch lucky, they manage to forget their misery, the cold and their red-rimmed sleepless eyes, by dropping off for a few minutes till a policeman comes along and wakes them up. Crowds of them lie every night on that little triangle of grass behind the Admiralty Arch which they called the Cabbage Patch.

The Cabbage Patch, where John Worby sees ‘dozens of men and women of all types sprawled out on the grass.’ Orwell’s ‘prostitutes and men lying in couples there in the bitter cold mist and dew.’ Details, grist to documentary fiction.

And it is to Trafalgar Square, the emblem of Empire, where in October 1921 Wal Hannington and other members of the newly-formed National Unemployed Workers’ Movement unfurled the Red Flag from the plinth of Nelson’s Column, that the Gilt Kid’s fate is sealed.

Trafalgar Square – Dreamstime

Trafalgar Square, where the Gilt Kid meets Jimmy Nunn, an ex-lag. A bum. The Gilt Kid’s guide and his future. Of whom the Gilt Kid learns the tricks of the trade. The secrets of the beggar’s parcel: old shirts, a couple of empty tins, old newspapers, brown paper to keep off rheumatism. And the box full of kerbstone twists – recycled tobacco fetched three pence an ounce on the streets –‘long, short, broken, some flattened with the impress of a careless heel, some idly thrown away with only a puff or two drawn out of them. The Gilt Kid made a vow never again to tread on an unwanted cigarette end.’ Of their kin, the Gilt Kid had spent his time penniless on London’s benches. He belongs with those on the crook:

They got too old for the game and had to end their lives sitting about in Trafalgar Square and on the Embankment. That was, unless they touched real lucky and went down for a long time. Five years’ penal servitude and seven years’ preventive detention. Some copped that. They died in Camp Hill instead of coughing their lungs up under Hungerford Bridge. It was a bastard whichever way you looked at it.

True crime feeds a willing market. Fictions weaved from Fleet Street, memory and the official report. Policing at the expense of the policed, lived experience sacrificed to the cult of the fact. Tear down the idols and dare to read the re-forgotten. Along with Patrick Hamilton’s The Midnight Bell, Gerald Kersh’s Night and the City and Robert Westerby’s Wide Boys Never Work, James Curtis in the Gilt Kid strips away the underworld’s seductive garments, relishing the cruelty.

References and Further Reading: Exploring London 1918-39

The time is ripe for travelling through the capital between the wars. While the maps are not as detailed as those charting the Victorian period, there are markers to aid the virgin explorer.

Ken Worpole’s Dockers and Detectives (Nottingham: Five Leaves, 2nd edn., 2008) is one of the first guides to draw attention to London’s rich popular literature. For a brief introduction to such novels see Merlin Coverley’s London Writing (Harpenden: Pocket Essentials, 2005). Our capital visions are a collision of fiction, memory, myth and history. A quirky yet poetic meditation on these themes lies in Iain Sinclair,Lights Out for the Territory (London: Penguin, 2003). The novels considered in my essay include:

Day-to-day snapshots of London were garnered from The Times. The grainy photographs and commentary captured in Paul Cohen-Portheim’s, The Spirit of London (London: Batsford, 2011 [1935]) are a useful complement. No London explorer can fail to ignore the London School of Economics’ nine volume New Survey of London Life and Labour (1930-35), in particular S.K. Ruck, ‘The Street Trading Community’, in Hubert L. Smith (ed.), The New Survey of London Life and Labour, Vol. 3: Survey of Social Conditions (1) The Eastern Area (London: P.S. King & Son Ltd, 1932). Further anthropological insights were gleaned from George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (London: Penguin, 2013 [1933]) and his diaries The Orwell Diaries, ed. Peter Davison [London: Penguin, 2010]). Stephen Graham’s haunting London Nights: A Series of Studies and Sketches of London at Night (London: Hurst & Blackett, 1925) is essential reading.

Anyone interested in London lowlife cannot fail to avoid the, at times, fantastic memories of this period. The following were consulted for this essay:

Frankie Fraser and James Morton, Mad Frank: Memoirs of a Life of Crime (London: Little, Brown, 1994)

John Worby, The Other Half: The Autobiography of a Spiv (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1937)

The above are a staple source for the burgeoning ‘true crime’ market. While such histories are light on meaning and interpretation, the authors deserve congratulation for raising the profile of London’s seamier side. The more fascinating include:

If I had only one book to recommend, it would be Jerry White’s Campbell Bunk: The Worst Street in North London between the Wars (London: Pimlico, 2nd edn. 2003), a thick description of what is condescendingly referred to as the ‘lumpenproletariat’. White’s ‘Police and Public in London in the 1930s’, Oral History, 11, 2 (1983), 34-41, is an early foray into the history of policing, while his magisterial London in the Twentieth Century: A City and its People (London: Penguin, 2002) places many of the themes addressed above in a wider historical context. Another well-written survey, based on oral interviews, is Gavin Weightman and Steven Humphries, Joanna Mack and John Taylor’s The Making of Modern London (London: Ebury Press, 2007).

Filed under: Crime, Culture, History, Literature, Review, Society Tagged: 1930s, Gerald Kersh, Graham Greene, James Curtis, London, Noir, Patrick Hamilton, Robert Westerby, Soho, Underworld]]>https://londonlowlife.wordpress.com/2017/02/17/lowlife-literature-the-gilt-kid/feed/0slater0211PicturePicturePicturePicturePicturePicturePictureRich Relations: Britain, Bahrain and Police Brutalityhttps://londonlowlife.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/rich-relations-britain-bahrain-and-police-brutality/
https://londonlowlife.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/rich-relations-britain-bahrain-and-police-brutality/#respondTue, 07 Feb 2017 08:08:35 +0000http://londonlowlife.wordpress.com/?p=6034Continue reading →]]>Bahrain, the kingdom of the two seas. A mainly Shia people of 1.4 million ruled by a minority Sunni elite. The despotic Sheikh Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa heads this nominal constitutional monarchy. A good egg, Mons Officer Cadet School (now Sandhurst) educated. Bans on public demonstrations. Restrictions on freedom of expression. Political parties prohibited, political societies allowed. Discrimination in jobs, health and housing. Five years in prison for “undermining” the government. A silence of journalists. Self-censorship. And 2017 marked death by firing squad for three Shia Muslims convicted of involvement in a bombing three years earlier, the first executions since 2010. Rumours of confession through torture.

Manama, Bahrain’s capital, home to the Arab Spring’s Pearl Revolution of 2011. Saudi troops called in to crush civil and political rights activists. Around 50 dead and hundreds arrested and injured. Over 3,500 imprisoned under this “Egyptian” strategy. Allegations of torture and mistreatment by the Ministry of Interior’s Criminal Investigation Directorate: beatings, electric shock, extreme cold, forced standing, mid-air suspension while handcuffed, and sexual abuse. The king’s son, Prince Nasser bin Hamad al-Khalifa, was allegedly involved in this torture. More than 4,000 sacked from their jobs or kicked out of university. No dissent brooked.

Rich relations persist between Britain and Bahrain following the latter’s independence from “protection” in 1971. 500 UK commercial agencies operate in Bahrain, with 90 businesses having branches in the kingdom. £295.5 million worth of goods were exported to Bahrain from Britain in 2014. £45 million of British arms sold to Bahrain between the Arab Spring and 2015.

With a liberal economy based on oil, banking, finance and construction, Bahrain was the first Gulf state to sign a Free Trade Agreement with the USA. The US Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based there too.

Are British interests in Bahrain, both commercial and political, causing a blind-eye in Westminster and Whitehall being turned to human rights violations in the Gulf?

The UK College of Policing has earned over £8.5 million from its overseas work since 2012. According to Alex Marshall, the College’s chief executive,

The College would never provide training, or support the use of its products, in a country which was considered to be using British resources for unethical purposes. [ … ] The College would consider it a disappointing lack of due diligence if a proposed formal contract had to be rejected on the basis of further human rights guidance from IPAB [International Police Assistance Brief].

Yet when pressed on this matter by the Home Office Select Committee, officials stonewalled:

We asked the College of Policing for details of their overseas work. Alex Marshall told us that he was advised by the Foreign Office not to answer our questions on this matter and cited reasons of commercial confidentiality and security.

The College of Policing signed an “agreement for the provision of services” with Bahrain in June 2015. Daniel Carey, of DPG Law, criticizes the document for not referring to human rights:

The agreement cedes a lot of control to the Bahrain government to pick and choose the areas it would like training on. It provides for all of the other controls you would expect: freedom of information; force majeure; confidentiality; intellectual property; termination; bribery. Why not human rights? Saying that this will be slipped into a subcontract does not seem to be an effective way to protect against human rights risks, especially after resisting disclosure of any of these details to a parliamentary committee.”

Collaboration by both British and Bahraini security forces is managed from the UK by the shadowy £1 billion Conflict, Security and Stability Fund (CSSF). Set up in April 2015 to replace a fund previously overseen by the Department for International Development, the Foreign Office and the Ministry of Defence, the CSSF is run by the National Security Council, a Cabinet Office committee. Partners comprise such controversial companies as G4S. Other repressive regimes receiving CSSF cash include Ethiopia.

In September 2015, the CSSF paid for a group of officials, including representatives from the British Embassy at Manama, to attend the British Mission to the United Nations at Geneva. According to journalists Alan White and Richard Wilson:

Experts who attended the meetings have told BuzzFeed News that the delegation who arrived in Geneva played a key role as British diplomats pushed their testimony around the UN while they pressed for references to torture and other human rights abuses to be removed from the draft text of the statement.

British officials are accused of watering-down a UN resolution criticizing human rights infringements in Bahrain. An early draft of this resolution seen by BuzzFeed shows that references to “arbitrary detention”, “indiscriminate use of riot police” and “repressive measures” were excised from the agreed final text. The sentence “We urge the government of Bahrain to make the institutions more impartial” was massaged to “We support the government of Bahrain continuing to work to make these institutions and the judiciary more impartial.”

Last year Britain spent £2.1 million on “reform assistance” to Bahrain’s security apparatus. Earlier this week the Sunday Times disclosed that Maya Foa of Reprieve, a human rights organization, has seen details of CSSF financed activities, including a trip by Tariq al-Hassan (Bahrain’s chief of police) to Northern Ireland:

The documents reveal that al-Hassan toured Belfast’s “flashpoint” neighbourhoods in a visit in June 2014 that included a briefing on gathering “community intelligence” and human rights complaint systems. In August 2015 a delegation of Bahraini senior commanders and frontline officers visited Belfast to learn how to manage “large-scale public order issues in a human rights compliant fashion.”

Briefings were given on dog-handling and water cannon. Reprieve charges further that “Britain paid for Bahrain’s police to learn how to whitewash deaths in custody.”

The Foreign Office denies that any public order training took place, the visit was a “technical assistance” programme. Using similar Orwellian language Alan Todd, assistant chief constable for the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), issued a similar denial:

The Bahrain delegation visited in August 2015 and, while in Northern Ireland, they observed a number of public order events and received a number of presentations on aspects of PSNI public order planning and delivery. At no time did the PSNI undertake any form of training with the officers.

Sayed Ahmed Alwadaei, of the Bahrain Institute for Rights and Democracy, charges:

The UK government has repeatedly denied providing any public order training, and now we know for a fact they’ve trained a police force which violently crushes pro-democracy protesters with sophisticated, British-made methods.

Are British officials conniving to cover-up relations by the British and Bahraini police? I agree with a report issued by the Home Affairs Select Committee:

We fully support the UK assisting police forces in other countries to improve the service they provide. The College of Policing has been put under pressure by the Home Office to raise revenue, including through providing overseas training, and we support its efforts in doing so. We note in passing the College’s insistence that as far as England and Wales are concerned they do not see themselves as a training body but as a standards setting body. The UK brand of policing is rightly respected internationally and should be disseminated as widely as possible. However, the provision of training on the basis of opaque agreements, sometimes with foreign governments which have been the subject of sustained criticism, threatens the integrity of the very brand of British policing that the College is trying to promote. It simply smacks of hypocrisy.

Filed under: International Relations, Policing, Politics Tagged: Alan Todd, Arab Spring, Arms Trade, Bahrain, BuzzFeed, College of Policing, Conflict Security and Stability Fund, Foreign Office, Home Office, Human RIghts, Manama, National Security Council, Pearl Revolution, Police, Police Service of Northern Ireland, Reprieve, Security, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, Sunday Times]]>https://londonlowlife.wordpress.com/2017/02/07/rich-relations-britain-bahrain-and-police-brutality/feed/0slater0211flickr_-_official_u-s-_navy_imagery_-_navys_senior_admiral_meets_with_bahraini_king-22011_bahraini_uprising_-_march_214atop_the_nearby_police_station_men_in_street_clothes_used_high-powered_cameras_to_snap_photographs_of_protesters-_-_flickr_-_al_jazeera_english1024px-mowpan0411police_officers_at_the_2011_belfast_riotsba-mapZeitgeist Slices: Cocaine Nightshttps://londonlowlife.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/zeitgeist-slices-cocaine-nights/
https://londonlowlife.wordpress.com/2017/01/30/zeitgeist-slices-cocaine-nights/#respondMon, 30 Jan 2017 22:09:23 +0000http://londonlowlife.wordpress.com/?p=5816Continue reading →]]>Which book captures the spirit of the age for you? Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta? Philip K Dick’s The Penultimate Truth? Maybe Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? Or George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four? In two essays for the Guardian, journalists and readers select their choice of novel heralding Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the USA. Western critiques of twenty-first century society. Yet no mention of J.G. Ballard, the sage of Shepperton, who in his 1968 pamphlet “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan” predicted the rise of the celebrity and his presidency.

Nearly thirty years later, Ballard released his crime fiction Cocaine Nights, not a “whodunit” but “how did it happen” detective story in a similar vein to Alan Moore’s Victorian melodrama From Hell. Hints of Murder on the Orient Express. A 1996 story focusing not on the psychology of the murderer, but an exploratory pathology of modern times.

But how do you energize people, give them back some sense of community? A world lying on its back is vulnerable to any cunning predator. Politics are a pastime for a professional caste and fail to excite the rest of us. Religious belief demands a vast effort of imaginative and emotional commitment, difficult to muster if you’re still groggy from last night’s sleeping pill. Only one thing is let which can rouse people, threaten them directly and force them to act together. Crime.

Set in the gated expat communities of Spain’s Costa del Sol’s “white-walled retirement complexes marooned like icebergs among the golf courses”, brain death is “disguised as a hundred miles of white cement.” A white silence hovers over this soporific society. The surveillance society and the new puritanism. Camera as memory. Amnesia, people forget who they are. A world peopled by those whose “only civic loyalties were to the nearest hypermarket and DIY store.”

Scratch at the veneer of civilization and see the boredom, alcoholism and drug – both illegal and prescription – addiction. People under house arrest, inside their own minds. Exhausted futures.

Charles Prentice prophesizes:

Already thinking of a travel article, I noted the features of this silent world: the memory-erasing white architecture; the enforced leisure that fossilized the nervous system; the almost Africanized aspect, but a North Africa invented by someone who had never visited the Maghreb; the apparent absence of any social structure; the timelessness of a world beyond boredom, with no past, no future and a diminishing present. Perhaps this was what a leisure-dominated future would resemble?

Opponents of the tendency of police officers – citizens in uniform – to resemble RoboCop, have a coup in the case of Judah Adunbi, the 63-year-old grandfather tasered in the face just over a week ago. Imagine the red faces and swiveling eyes at Avon and Somerset constabulary’s senior management, press & PR teams, faced with headlines along the lines of:

Adunbi was a founding member of Bristol’s Independent Advisory Group, a forum for fostering co-operation between the Afro-Caribbean community and local coppers.

Stopped on the street by two police officers, Adunbi was told he was under arrest. According to Adunbi, this was the second time he has been mistaken for a drug dealer. A neighbour filming can be heard criticizing the constables for intensifying the incident.

Support also came from Nick Glynn, a black man who served on the thin blue line for 31 years:

Confronting an individual based on a vague description and using a weapon that can kill is neither an acceptable nor effective method of policing. This shocking footage of police officers tasering a black man on the basis of mistaken identity only serves to alienate people who could be helping officers with their inquiries. It is particularly disturbing to see officers target a man who is dedicated to supporting the police and keeping everyone safe.

Vince Howard, speaking on behalf of the local Police Federation, defended his colleagues:

Officers try to de-escalate the situation by explaining who they are looking for and their belief that he is the wanted man. At no time during the interactions between the officers and this man does he say he is not the wanted person, he simply continues to be abusive towards the officer. The two officers then arrest the man, during which time one of the officers is assaulted and Taser is deployed. The officers were doing what the public expect of them, attempting to detain a wanted and potentially dangerous man.

As to what actually happened will be revealed by an Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) investigation; Avon and Somerset police referred the case, in accordance with procedure, to the IPCC. Both officers were wearing body cameras.

The Adunbi affair is bound to reignite concerns by civil liberies, community relations and social justice groups about police use of tasers. Back in 2015, a Freedom of Information request submitted by the BBC to the Home Office revealed that black people were three times as likely to be tasered than their white counterparts. Forming only 4.4% of the population, black people were on the receiving end of 12.7% of Taser incidents. Though Asians, accounting for 8.1% of the population, were only involved in 4% of episodes.

Who May Carry a Taser?

The Taser X26 model, a yellow pistol shaped gun, discharges up to 50,000 volts at 0.0021 amps to a target at a maximum distance of 21 feet. Introduced to firearms officers in England and Wales in 2004, Taser use was extended to specially trained constables four years later. Policemen and women must undergo 18 hours of training over 3 days before being issued with a Taser, a 6 hour refresher course must be attended annually. According to National Police Chiefs’ Council guidelines:

Every chief constable makes a decision, based on an assessment of the risks in their own area, to train and deploy a proportionate number of officers to use Taser so that the public are kept safe and their officers are protected as far as possible.

How effective are Tasers?

Deterrence is the chief value of the Taser. An action must be recorded every time an officer draws a Taser. Home Office figures show that that Tasers are only fired at a target 20% of the time. While the number of taser actions increased from 6,649 to 10,380 between 2010 and 2013, the latter year was the first time all 43 constabularies across England and Wales issued full Taser returns to the Home Office. Despite concerns over “mission creep”, that Tasers will be used because they are available rather than necessary, that they are no longer a means of last resort. Taser firings stabilized at an average of 1,732 incidents 2013-15.

What about the consequences of being Tasered?

Last year the High Court, at the request of the IPCC, overturned an IPCC report clearing Greater Manchester Police of any wrongdoing in the death of Jordan Begley in 2013. The police were called by Begley’s mother to their house in Gorton, Manchester, she claimed he had a knife and feared for him getting into a fight. 23-year-old Begley, an ice-cream worker and known piss-and-coke-head, was tasered and died two hours later. Two years later, a jury found that Taser use and subsequent police restraint techniques contributed to Begley’s untimely death.

However, it would be imprudent to ignore a review of Taser use by the British Medical Journal in 2010:

The medical consequences of these discharges include barb injuries, localised discharge burns, and injury from falls or from the intense muscle contraction. Eye and brain injuries from barb penetration have been documented. Tonic-clonic seizure [often associated with epilepsy] after discharge of a conducted energy device to the head has been described. Pneumothorax (collapsed lung) after pleural barb penetration has been reported. Six fatal head injuries may have resulted from falls induced by these devices. Discharge of a conducted energy device does not induce clinically relevant changes in heart rate, blood pressure, or respiratory related parameters in healthy subjects. Reports in the medical literature of serious injuries associated with the deployment of Tasers are few, despite several hundred thousand estimated uses of the device.

I have no problem with the principle of police officers carrying Tasers. It is questionable as to whether this weapon should be issued to all constables. Advice by the National Police Chiefs’ Council on Taser use is vague:

Taser provides an additional option to resolve situations, including the threat of violence, which can come from any section of the public. In certain circumstances, the use of Taser is more appropriate than other use of force options in resolving dangerous situations safely and with less risk of serious injury. In addition, officers who are trained and equipped with Taser must decide on the most reasonable and necessary use of force in the circumstances. The level of force used must be proportionate to achieve the objective and officers are individually accountable in law for the amount of force they use on a person.

Whistleblowing. An affront to the Met’s “Total Policing”, an Orwellian creation of Commissioner Sir Bernard Hogan-Howe.

Shoot the messenger. Police canteen culture has never been kind to the whistleblower, no one likes a grass. Watch out for the firm in a firm. But it’s nothing new.

Back in 1922 Sergeant Horace Josling was posted to London’s “C” Division, a West End manor covering parts of Soho. Within a week of joining his beat Josling’s colleague, George Goddard, invited him to the weekly divvy up from the local street bookies – off-course cash betting being a criminal offence until 1960. The bookies were on his case too. Josling declined politely.

Tiring of the situation and wary of reporting these concerns to his immediate superiors, Josling wrote directly to the Commissioner. The proverbial book was thrown. After two days of cross-examination, Josling was required to resign from the Met after ten years of duty, service record marked: “Discreditable conduct – acting in a manner prejudicial to discipline or likely to bring discredit on the reputation of the Force”.

In January 1929 Sergeant George Goddard was sent down for eighteen months of hard labour, with a £2,000 fine plus costs. Receiving 89 commendations from the Commissioner for his role in raiding nightclubs, brothels and betting houses, this guardian of London’s morals had been living the high life. On a respectable salary of just over £6 a week, Goddard’s venal ventures had acquired him a freehold at £1,875 and a Chrysler for £400. £12,471 and 10 shillings were also stashed in three safety deposit boxes. Overall, Goddard’s realizable assets amounted to nearly £18,000. Depending on what your measuring, eighteen grand is worth around £3 million today.

History does not repeat itself, as Mark Twain may have said, but it often rhymes; echoing through to the twenty-first century.

The Met’s Detective Sergeant Pal Singh is facing a gross misconduct hearing for alleging to the Daily Telegraph that the Crown Prosecution Service is “afraid to tackle honour crimes for fear of causing unrest in Asian communities”. Singh, who has received a Metropolitan Police Service Award, amongst others, for “Outstanding Individual Contribution to Victim Care”, told the Telegraph:

Forced marriage is a violation of human rights, which invariably leads to marital rape and years of domestic abuse and modern slavery, with sometimes fatal consequences. If this is not a policing priority then I am content at being dismissed.

Within five years you’ll be reading about Mr Singh’s successful employment tribunal, an undisclosed payout – a cost to the taxpayer – and Met management bollocks-speak about “cultural sensitivity” and “lessons learned”.

Sources

The National Archives (TNA), Kew, DPP 1/87; 4/55-56

TNA, MEPO 3/2462, 2481

Clive Emsley, The Great British Bobby: A History of British Policing from the 18th Century to the Present (London: Quercus, 2009)